ESPN Draft Day: Scenes From a Mel

By MIKE PENNER

April 21, 2001 12 AM PT

Next up on the board: the inexact, exhausting science of covering the NFL draft, a two-day endurance test of red-raw vocal cords, crushed Diet Coke cans, bulging bladders and a nonstop frontal-lobe assault by sliders, ‘tweeners, reaches, projects, projection picks and triangle numbers.

As usual, there is disagreement on the ESPN set.

Chris Berman says he dreads the runaway roll call the same way he used to dread final exams in college. “It’s a reminder of why I never went to grad school,” he says. “It’s a course you have to ace, not pass. . . . It’s the hardest thing I do here, and not because of the 10 hours that I’m on the air, which, frankly, are hard, but that’s OK. That’s all right. I relate it to what [Peter] Jennings and [Tom] Brokaw do on election night. Except we do it every year.”

Fred Gaudelli, longtime producer of ESPN’s NFL draft coverage before moving to ABC last month, calls the draft “the hardest show I ever did; in terms of the amount of hours you’re on the air, in terms of the amount of details you had to have down, the number of things you have to react to that you cannot possibly plan for. I had a pretty good run, but the six to eight weeks of preparation you needed to get ready for it, it got to be grind.”

Mel Kiper Jr., however, cannot concur.

“It’s two days in April, when you haven’t seen football, you haven’t heard football, you haven’t talked football since January,” he says. “What could be better than taking those two days, Saturday and Sunday, and just enjoy two days of talking and watching football?”

This talk does not surprise Berman, who is well aware that Kiper, ESPN’s resident draftologist, lives in a different world from ours.

“This is his Christmas,” Berman says.

From the Kiper perspective, the draft is two days of showtime after 363 days of grunt work. What’s the use of tracking all those 40-yard times and bench-press numbers if there’s no hair gel-and-pancake makeup payoff at the end?

Berman and Gaudelli view the draft from a more practical perspective.

Such as: What to do when you’re on the set for 10 consecutive hours, you’re miked up and wired in, and nature calls?

“You can’t get up and go to the bathroom,” Gaudelli says.

So what happens then?

“You hold it, man,” Gaudelli says.

But it is no laughing matter, not when Berman power-chugs ice-cold Diet Coke just to keep his vocal cords functioning for the 10 hours he is on air Saturday.

“I live on the stuff,” he says. “It does the trick because, I guess, it juices you up, but it also kind of freezes my vocal cords. If you come on with a sore throat, there’s tea and honey. But for me, the cold hitting your throat right out of the can, believe me, I’ve made my whole career on it.”

Berman only works the Saturday show because, Gaudelli reports: “There was one year we tried to have Chris do both days, and on Day 2, he had no voice. He really had no voice.”

Brain cells also are an endangered species.

“Believe me, by the end of the night, I’m an interesting person,” Berman says. “I still remember one year, a young couple from Kansas City came up to me [after the show] and said, ‘Oh, we’re big Chiefs fans! Who did they draft today?’ I told them I had no idea.

“They looked at me and said, ‘How can you not know?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, I really don’t remember.’ That was a legitimate answer. I stood there and my jaw dropped and I was, like, Whoa!

“I had to ask the bartender and he knew. I said thanks. And here I had just hosted the damn thing.”

Gaudelli knows the feeling.

“When you’re on the air for two days, for almost 18 live hours . . . after a while, you’re just wacky from the whole thing,” he says. “Your sense of humor broadens. You have a lot of things you have to laugh at.”

After more than two decades of NFL draft coverage, here are some ESPN classics:

THE END OF THE BUBBLE GUY

On paper, it sounded like good television: Send a camera crew to the home of a player “on the bubble”--a possible late first-round draft choice who could slide to the second or deeper. Check in with him every so often as he waits for the phone call. Be there when the call comes, capture the inevitable outburst of relief and joy.

Best-case scenario: In 1988, ESPN chooses Oklahoma State running back Thurman Thomas as its “bubble guy”--and television viewers watch as he agonizes for a while, then finally falls asleep as seven running backs are selected ahead of him, including Brad Muster, Ickey Woods and Tony Jeffery. Thomas wakes up in the middle of the second round, when the Buffalo Bills select a future hall of famer with the 40th pick of the draft.

Worst-case scenario: Two years later, ESPN anoints Pittsburgh defensive lineman Marc Spindler--”an All-American player, everybody thought he’d probably go in the first round, or if not, probably the first couple picks in the second round,” Gaudelli says. In other words, the ideal bubble guy.

“Marc was from a town in Pennsylvania where his parents had a lounge called ‘Spindler’s Lounge,’ and they were having a big party. We sent Jimmy Roberts, who’s now at NBC, to go there and be with the bubble guy. Well, in those days, we only covered Day 1 of the draft. About a seven-hour show, you might get through 2 1/2 or three rounds.

“So, first round, no Marc Spindler. Second round, no Marc Spindler. We go back out there, put him on TV and guys are calling him and hanging up on him. He’d pick up the phone and say, ‘Hello? Oh, crank call.’ And on our end, Mel’s going, ‘I’m telling you, this guy’s gonna be a Pro Bowl player, he’s gonna do this . . .’

“So we go off the air--he still hadn’t been selected.

“The second we’re off the air, he was selected.”

Spindler went to the Detroit Lions in the third round with the 62nd pick of the draft--on a day ESPN televised only the first 61.

“That forever killed the bubble player,” Gaudelli said. “No one ever wanted to be the bubble player because of the embarrassment Marc Spindler suffered.”

Spindler, by the way, had a long NFL career but never made the Pro Bowl.

KIPER VERSUS THE NEW YORK JETS

Kiper made his ESPN draft-day debut in 1984, but his breakthrough came on the 14th selection of the 1989 draft, which the New York Jets used to pick Virginia linebacker Jeff Lageman.

“That put Mel on the map,” Gaudelli says.

“The first Mel Kiper sighting,” Berman agrees.

As Gaudelli tells it, “When the Jets took Jeff Lageman, Mel’s comment was, ‘Look, I have no problem with Jeff Lageman as a football player. I think he’s an excellent football player and I think he’s got a good future in the NFL. But for the Jets to select Jeff Lageman with the 14th pick absolutely demonstrates to me that the Jets have no idea what they’re doing.’

“The Jet fans freaked, because they didn’t want Jeff Lageman. And they were sitting in the stands, right on top of us, and the place went crazy! That’s when Mel really became, like, Mel.”

Kiper: “I didn’t have a problem with Lageman. I thought it was too high. Of course, remember, he was drafted as a middle linebacker, moved to outside linebacker, was a bust and then really caught on at defensive end--which was not the position they drafted him at.

“I said they should have traded down, I thought they should have gone down to, maybe, 18 to 23 and they’d still be able to select Lageman because I was pretty sure the teams in between were not going to take him. They would have picked up extra choices. Remember, this was not a good football team. They could have used some extra twos, threes, fours and fives.

“They didn’t make that move down, so I was critical of the Jets. [Jet executive Mike Hickey] made the comment, ‘Basically, who is this guy who works out of his basement in Baltimore?’ It was major controversy when it was brought back to my attention. The Hickey thing is probably something a lot of people will never forget.”

But for Kiper, it was merely the warmup act for the big show five years down the line.

KIPER VERSUS BILL TOBIN

In retrospect, it really wasn’t much of a choice: Trent Dilfer or Trev Alberts.

Kiper thought Indianapolis Colt general manager Bill Tobin should have used the fifth pick of the 1994 draft on Dilfer, Tobin picked Alberts instead, and with that, the fuse to the powder keg was lit.

After Kiper criticized the selection of Alberts, a linebacker from Nebraska, Tobin responded, on camera, with Kiper listening in on the ESPN set, “Who the hell is Mel Kiper? My mailman knows more about the draft than he does.”

If there’s one ESPN draft moment for the time capsule, this is the one. Gaudelli calls the Kiper-Tobin exchange “great TV.” “I got to know Bill Tobin pretty well and I’m sure Bill was speaking for a lot of people in the league who were tired of Mel’s criticisms.

“When Tobin said what he said, Mel, to his credit, didn’t back down. He stood his ground and he stood it professionally. But everybody on the set was laughing. Joe [Theismann] and Chris, they were laughing. They were all pretty much laughing in the truck. That was one of the really fun moments.”

Seven Aprils later, Kiper doesn’t look back on the incident as fondly.

“I thought it was a cheap shot,” he says. “I don’t think there was any reason for him to do that. . . . Basically, all I said was that the Colts should have gone for a quarterback and they should not have taken Alberts at that point over Dilfer and that was it. I never made any personal attack, I never mentioned Bill Tobin’s name or anybody in the personnel department. I just questioned the pick and criticized the selection.

“I said it on draft day. I said, ‘I have a lot of confidence in what I do and feel like you work hard all year and you basically provide an opinion. If you’re right or wrong, it’s just an opinion. [Tobin] took an exception--he has a right to do that. But, also, some of the things he said, I think, kind of boomeranged on him.

“He was not there much longer after that. And, certainly, you look at the way the careers of the players involved have gone. It’s ironic that here we are, Tobin’s back in the league with the Detroit Lions the same year Trent Dilfer won a Super Bowl.”

CLUELESS IN ST. LOUIS

Finally, a tale to brighten the draft day of all old Los Angeles/Anaheim Ram fans:

In 1996, after their first season in St. Louis, the Rams made controversial running back Lawrence Phillips of Nebraska their first choice in the draft, No. 6 overall.

“There was obviously great debate over whether a team should take on Phillips based on his past problems,” Gaudelli says. “So we’re going along and Mel was at it. He said if he had 15 draft choices, he wouldn’t take Lawrence Phillips with any of them. In the interim, the Rams select Lawrence Phillips.

“Well, who’s sitting at the Rams’ table but Georgia Frontiere. Now if you remember, all of Lawrence Phillips’ issues were related to battering women. So we told Craig James to go over there and talk to Georgia Frontiere about drafting a guy who has some serious issues related to the way he treats women.”

Gaudelli re-creates the exchange that followed.

James: “Georgia, I’d like to talk to you about your draft choice Lawrence Phillips here.”

Frontiere: “Didn’t you play college football with Eric Dickerson?”

James: “Um, yeah. But anyway . . .”

Frontiere: “Well, you did play with him, right?”

James: “Yeah, I did.”

Frontiere: “Well, you know, you’re doing a lot better than he is right now.”

James: “Well, if you don’t start answering this question, I won’t be for long.”

Frontiere, according to Gaudelli, was “totally in some altered state.” “She probably had no idea who Lawrence Phillips was,” he said. “She certainly had no idea about the controversy surrounding him. They just drafted a guy who had a record for domestic abuse--’What do you think?’

“She just said, ‘My football people know what they’re doing and if there are any problems I’m sure we’ll get him help.’ You know, just one of those things. I’ll never forget that.”

Oh, football fans in Los Angeles and Orange County remember too. For them, there’s no more embarrassment on draft day. It’s St. Louis’ problem now.